Part two of Dan Moller’s response to my analysis of Governing Least:
Immigration
I agree with Caplan that we should have high levels of immigration for both moral and self-interested reasons, and that a great deal of resistance to this traces back to confused zero-sum thinking about trade and jobs, or to xenophobia. The point where we may disagree is this: I don’t think libertarianism (or its core ideas and values) entails open borders. Reasonable people who take seriously individual rights, limited government, and the rest, can favor borders and some restrictions on immigration, depending on the particulars.
Consider Island, a small country off the US coast. Over the years, American tourists enjoy visiting Island. Gradually, their influence becomes more and more pronounced, to the point that Island starts to lose its language (French, perhaps), American missionaries introduce what Islanders view as false gods, etc. I disagree that the people of Island have no recourse for meeting what they will see as an unwelcome threat. I don’t think it’s true that Island must accept a kind of hostile takeover by Americans. I think this is true even intranationally–if the Amish want to stay Amish, they don’t have to accept a mass influx of Brooklyn hipsters, supposing they have legal means of preventing this, and that their reasons are good ones. It would be hard to believe in freedom of association and think they did.
Of course, none of this is to speak to the present-day US, and I agree with a great deal of what Caplan says about the moral imperatives of benefiting and being benefited by immigration. Obviously the US and Island are quite different. But the Island case suggests to me, again, that libertarian values don’t entail open borders.
READER COMMENTS
Jared
May 14 2019 at 10:59am
“I disagree that the people of Island have no recourse for meeting what they will see as an unwelcome threat. I don’t think it’s true that Island must accept a kind of hostile takeover by Americans.”
Who is “they”. Clearly some people are quite welcoming to Americans–the ones renting American tourists rooms, selling American tourists food, and so on. So what the author ultimately means (it seems to me) is
“I disagree that some people on Island should be allowed to use force to prevent other people on Island from allowing ‘too many’ Americans to come to Island, because Island is changing in ways that those people don’t like.”
If that’s so, can this group of Islanders also use force to keep other Islanders from changing the culture of Island in ways they don’t like?
Seth Green
May 14 2019 at 11:14am
(Epistemic status: am still thinking this through)
Following on the island example: we are imagining a scenario where space is so scarce, and opportunities for exit so costly, that maybe a system of collective (but private!) ownership would be optimal. You could say that a small island is like a NYC co-op. A Co-op is fully entitled to make rules about who can live there and to set limits.
But the US is huge. The Amish could feasibly buy up a whole town, build a fence around it, and put in restrictions about who can move in, and there’d still be a lot of land left over for immigrants. To keep with the island example, my intuitions about what are appropriate for Australia, and what’s appropriate for Masig Island (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/world/australia/climate-change-torres-strait-islands.html) are very different.
Then again, what’s different about putting up a fence around your community, and putting a fence around your country, is not obvious to me. Differences in ownership don’t quite get at it, I think.
Mark
May 14 2019 at 11:28am
I think there’s a difference between a tiny island or Amish commune and a continent-sized country like the United States.
Here’s a thought experiment—what if a single person owned all the land in the United States. Would it be libertarian for that single person to have unfettered discretion as to what happens and who is allowed on his land? I would say no—that would be a feudal system.
The libertarian theory of land ownership is that you can own land if you improve the land with your labor and there is plenty of land left over for others. Neither of these requirements are met in the case of a large mostly-empty country like the United States.
robc
May 15 2019 at 12:24pm
That is Locke’s theory of land ownership, it is not universal among libertarians.
Me, for example, who agrees with both Henry George and Ludwig von Mises that there is no natural law right to land ownership.
It is a useful fiction, but while I am a big fan of natural law in general, Locke was wrong in this case.
Nick
May 15 2019 at 11:49pm
This is the slippery slope hard line anarchists fear discourse might fall into if the advocacy of anarchism was done with Humerian arguments.
Moller has basically pulled the grounds, “uncontroversial premises”, from under Huemer and used that to argue that ‘reasonable people’ may disagree that the ideals of limited government entails open borders.
I think there’s probably no settling this issue unless we revert to the hard Rothbardian arguments.
Daniel Carroll
May 14 2019 at 1:11pm
The argument from the “island” analogy is an argument about externalities. In the case of Island, the externalities from a large influx of Americans are very large. The externalities from immigration to the US have so far been small and mostly positive – certainly no more negative than from Yankees from the North migrating to Florida and Texas. If a billion people suddenly moved to the US, then the analogy might work.
Weir
May 14 2019 at 11:14pm
Take the perspective of a Cherokee or a Choctaw. You put Netflix and Walgreen’s in one column, and the Trail of Tears in another.
How does anyone weigh these positives and negatives? I’m not a utilitarian, so I don’t have to pretend it’s possible to make that calculation. But I can easily compare immigrants from the south of England with immigrants from what David Hackett Fischer, in Albion’s Seed, calls the North Midlands. That’s because the former introduced slavery, which was a disaster. I prefer the Quakers.
Now from Bryan’s perspective, the Cavalier slaveowners and the Quaker abolitionists are all just workers. That’s not an intuitive position, so Bryan’s made life difficult for himself with this interchangeability argument.
And we’ve also seen the difficulty he gets into with the other glaring fallacy that he’s committed himself to, which is that there is no relevant or significant difference between one billion people beaming into Miami in an instant, and then a more gradual or more widely dispersed scenario.
His solution to that one is that, in practice, it isn’t going to happen in real life that one billion people simply turn up all at once. But that’s not the philosophical argument he’s in, is it?
He’s committed himself to the philosophy that one billion people is not as good as two billion people, which is not as good as three billion people, all at once, because his claim is that there is no weakness to the argument for open borders, pure and simple, no qualifications, no caveats. But a philosopher can’t use practical difficulties about transport times to dodge the problem with his argument, which is that there is no number at all at which the negative externalities might conceivably outweigh the positive externalities.
The problem with Moller’s argument is that every street in a big American city looks like an “island” to the people who own real estate on that street.
Zoning laws and the mortgage interest deduction and all the other subsidies and restrictions have created millions of tiny islands throughout all the richest cities, but homeowners don’t think any of that counts as a wall. They can’t see how they’ve built these walls around themselves, and bristle at the very suggestion.
BC
May 14 2019 at 11:06pm
I’m glad that Moller agrees that his argument against open immigration should be applied intra-nationally as there is nothing about cultural protection that necessarily aligns with political borders. The Amish case is a perfect example.
Do Amish towns actually have laws that prevent non-Amish migration and property ownership? I always thought Amish communities’ character was preserved by custom and tradition, i.e., non-Amish would not want to move into those communities.
I think application of the cultural protection argument intra-nationally actually exposes the weakness of it. Suppose a town or state legislative body passes a law that excludes certain ethnicities or members of other cultural groups from buying or renting houses. (Aside: the phrase “legislative body passes a law” avoids the troublesome question of who “they” refers to in “they decide”.) Or, suppose the law excludes professors out of concern that professors corrupt the culture. Such laws infringe libertarian conceptions of right to own, sell, buy, lease, and possess property. Property rights are individual, not collective. Collective property ownership, which in truth is government property ownership, is a socialist ideal.
BC
May 14 2019 at 11:14pm
Amish exclusivity enforced through private property — an Amish company owns all the property and leases homes only to Amish — would not violate libertarian principles. Government-imposed migration restrictions are anti-libertarian because they replace private freedom of association with government restrictions on association.
Nick
May 15 2019 at 11:49pm
This is the slippery slope hard line anarchists fear discourse might fall into if the advocacy of anarchism was done with Humerian arguments.
Moller has basically pulled the grounds, “uncontroversial premises”, from under Huemer and used that to argue that ‘reasonable people’ may disagree that the ideals of limited government entails open borders.
I think there’s probably no settling this issue unless we revert to the hard Rothbardian arguments.
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